fried_chicken

Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall, it's strange to see it written own and be such a large number.  I remember being in High School and watching the news reports about it at the time, I remember our History teacher, Mr O'Connell scrapping the lesson he had planned for that week and just talking to us pretty much for an hour straight about what this meant.

I've been chatting to one of the guys in the office this morning about it as I knew he was based out in Germany in the Army Intelligence Corps.  I thought he shipped out after the Wall had fallen, but apparently not.  He remembers the event more vividly apparently as the weekend before was the first day he was covering the East German desk by himself on a Saturday and all hell broken loose as reports started rolling in about the East German Army starting to move.

 These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

Everything is a little up in the air at the moment emotionally, I found out last week that one of my friends - John - has terminal cancer.  He's been given 2-3 months, perhaps a little longer depending on treatment.

The real kick in the teeth is that John has been a chef for most of his life, he likes good food, but part and parcel of the chef thing seems to be heavy smoking and a fair amount of alcohol.  This type of cancer isn't tied to smoking or alcohol at all though apparently, one of the things it ties to is a bad diet.

Sometimes the universe has a sick sense of humour.

It's all a little big to take in and process, to be honest I'm not certain how much of it I do want to take onboard.  I don't want it to change the way I look at or deal with John, because if that was me, I think I'd hate that more than anything.

Kat's been really supportive of John while all this is going on, it's one of the things that makes me love her.  At times she can come across to people that don't know her well as quite self-centered, but whenever one of her friends needs help or support though she'll drop everything and try and do what she can.  It definitely puts her under the category of a 'good person' in my book, no matter how much the goth in her may try to deny it.

Seem to have been watching a fair few films recently, some brand new and others that have been around for a couple of years but I just either never got around to watching at the cinema or bought them because they looked interesting on DVD and just never had the time to actually sit down and watch them, in fact I've still got Children of Men and The Illusionist that must have been sitting on my shelf unwatched for nearly two years now.

One was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it looked really good on the trailers and Jim Carrey dispite how his career got launched seems to be exceptionally good at playing sublte characters within odd or surrel settings.  Finally got around to seeing it in the last couple of weeks and really enjoyed it.

Last night was In Bruges, a wonderfully black comedy about a pair of hitmen laying low after something goes badly wrong and a child gets killed in the cross fire, dealing with the emotional fallout from such an event.  Well worth looking at if you've not come across it before and I can't praise it enough, but equally don't want to spoil anything for people that haven't already seen it.

Went to see Inglourious Basterds at the cinema as well, it seems to have split opinions on it - as so many Tarantino films seem to do - but I really enjoyed it.  Some of the critisim is very odd though, I don't know about you lot but when I go to the cinema I'm not often looking for a film to be documentary like in it's historical accuracy, I want something that is just enjoyable, whether it's through a good script, story, acting or combination of the three.  And with that in mind I think it really delivered.

 1. What would a...

 

 

Never mind what the chair would look like, how would you know which direction you were going in?

 

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So things seem to be going well with the Blood Bowl league, even after loosing to the Dwarves on Monday the Nurgle team is still - amazingly - topping the league tables and it's been a really good laugh getting back into it again.

Kat's got a ton of ideas when it comes to painting the team so I think it's going to be a case of let her go wild and have some fun with it.

Just logged into facebook to respond to a friend request... and my default language was set to French... you'd think you'd remember doing something like that, right?! 

davedevil 's latest post HERE has brought back a lot of wonderful memories about the old Huddersfield Mage game.

Tom and I were both sharing a house at the time with Derek the ST and both playing characters that were young, idealist, somewhat messed up and at times very, very foolish.

I have so many fond memories of our two man terror campaign against the Technocracy, like infiltrating the Progenator's lab dressed pretty much as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and pretending to be Void Engineer's; coming away from it with some valuable information, a talking plant, a couple of packets of Chocolate Hobnobs and the Lab's put upon tea boy.

My favourite had to be the planned raid on a Syndicate quitessense shipment which we'd planned out pretty much as the Italian Job, and led to months of Tom and I pausing while wandering around Huddersfield, looking thoughtfully at something and then asking whoever we were with at the time "Do you think you could get a mini through there?"

One of the things I think I enjoyed the most about those old games though was Derek's storytelling, he managed to put across a very dark and sinister world and we really were the underdogs with whatever grasp we had slowly slipping away... seemingly kooky plans became a way of trying to trying to stand against it all and try and keep some hold on sanity.

I introduced Kat to Collateral earlier on this week, I'd forgotten quite how good a film it is and proves that hey, you know what Tom Cruise can actually act outside of the same old Plot Railroad that a lot of his films seem to shunt along down, that being:


Then again it's not the type of film that appeals to the usual Tom Cruise audience, which got me thinking about films that people who fall into a certain social bracket should definitely make sure they see.

Things like;
- geeks everywhere should watch Hackers
- roleplayers would be mad to miss Gattica and Fallen.
- anybody with a twisted sense of humour should see But I'm a Cheerleader.

Feel free to throw your own.

And now that I've praised Tom Cruise at the start of the post, time to balance the universal scales somewhat with some Jonathon Coulton.

The start of World War II, or at least the announcement of Britain's involvement as they declared a state of war with Germany, was 70 years ago today.

Practically a life time ago.

It's still somewhat sobering to think that practically everybody that I know will have had relatives that were involved in WWII in one way or another, and there are times when I wish I'd have been old enough to speak to my Grand Parents, and Great Aunts and Uncles about their experiences before they passed away.

Strangely it was a topic I hit on with my Uncles at Danielle's wedding a few months back, my grandad never really spoke about what happened to Mark (the youngest or my Uncles), or my Mum, but Stuart knew a lot more.  Before that conversation I knew he was in the Navy, but that was about it.  He'd been a gunner on the HMS Birmingham, one of the ships protecting the Merchant Fleet as it crossed the Atlantic and had been on the boat when it was torpedoed, his Brother worked as a mechanic for the RAF, my Grandma worked in the munitions factories in Sheffield and her younger sister spent the war working in Eygpt.  There's a huge photo journal that she kept while she was over there that my Uncle still has.

It's odd to think about something that we're taught so much about during school is even now beginning to pass out of living memory.

The idea of single storage within secure areas of the Cloud seems to be coming more and more common this year, in fact I'd pretty much label 2009 as the Year of the Cloud, I don;t know if anybody else has had a play around with SkyDrive on Windows Live yet, but THIS seems to be something very similar in idea... however taking it to the next step.

Basically it creates a new drive on your computer(s) / iPhone that is actually on the net, you drag and drop your files in there and they're then available whenever you're online with the software itself keeping local stores of your frequently accessed files (where space is available).

 

1Gb is free, up to 10Gb is $2.99 per month, ranging up to 500Gb of storage for $79.99.

Be interesting to see what comes next.

 It seems to be one of those weird days, everybody in the office is irritable... including myself.

So last night was the first outing of Chalice of Filth, my Nurgle Blood Bowl team, against a Khemari (think Skeleton's and Mummies with shoulder pads and a bad attitude) team which already had a couple of games under their belt.

Khemari can be a very overpowering team with Mummies that are incredibly destructive, so it was a real boost when one of my shabbling, disease ridden, walking corpses managed to kill one off permenantly by putting the boot in while it was on the floor during the first push... and that helped to set the scene for the rest of the match.

Although there was no other deaths, I managed to get a 3-0 victory, inflicted a couple of casulties without taking anything Regeneration didn't throw off, and managed the first successful Long Bomb pass out of all the games played... not to bad when you consider the Nurgle team have the ball handling skills you'd expect of players that tend to leave bits of themselves scattered around the pitch as they sloth off.

Just got to see how things progress from here on in, but it's a cracking start.

So WFRP 3rd edition?!  

Definitely different.  

It really is striking me as almost a relaunch of Advanced HeroQuest rather than Warhammer though, but it does seem to be a direction that a lot of the games industry is going in these days which we started to see with books like *shudders* Cyberpunk 3rd Ed, the idea that to fit in with the groundwork laid down in computer games and MMorpg's people don't want to spend a long time going through character creation, they just want to be able to pick something up there and then and run with it, after making only a few basic decisions.

Now to a certain extent I can see the appeal there, but equally by trying to condense down and make it as quick and simple as possible you also start loosing a lot of the depth that was previously there and difference that would often creep in to Characters that would otherwise be identical.

A lot of people seem to be hung up on the custom dice decision, but as far as I'm concerned it tends to be a side issue, games just need some method of adding in a randomising factor whether it's D10, Block Dice, Stuff or just three 2p coins they all pretty much do the same job, it's what they've decided to cut back out of the rest of it which concerns me.

So I think it will definitely be a case of watch and wait.

Don't know what it is about today but it's looking like it's going to be a slow one here in Manchester.  So I'm having to resort to posting very, very bad puns.  

I warn you in advance, they will make you groan.  Enjoy.



The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference He acquired his size from too much pi

I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian

She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still

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So after much persuasion and cajoling I've been suckered into reading the Dresden File books.  

I don't know if it's just me, but whenever so many people tell you something is great and that 'it's really you' and 'you'll love it' literally forcing copies of books, dvds or music - mainly books though - upon you that it sometimes has the opposite effect of making me less inclined to actually pick it up and take a look.

Maybe it's worry over disappointing somebody else if you try it and just find that it's not your thing, or not as great as they make out; which happened memoribly with recommendations of Oranges or Not the Only Fruit, and Generation X.

Possibly it could just be the fact that you find certain genres only appealling when you're in the right mood or mental state to read them.

Or perhaps it's just sheer bloody mindedness that, "I'll get around to reading it when I'm good and ready!"

All that aside though after somewhere in the region of two years harassment last month I picked up Storm Front and started on it.  three or so weeks on from that and last night I started the ninth book in the series.

They are very good, flow really easily, good character progression, and Jim Butcher either has a fixed overal plot arc in mind or is far and above a better writter than I've so far given him credit for.

This morning got me thinking about whether or not they're the types of books I'd happily come back to though and re-read, which then led to further trains of though about books that I will quite happily pick up a second, third, sixth or twenty third time and why.

The Amber series is a set of books that I will quite happily go back to over and over again, every time I read it I pick up on additional things and new takes on old events and it's just so easy to get drawn into Zelazny's storytelling.  I got Manna from Heaven last year and reading through some of the shorts in there really does make me wish he'd had the opportunity to bring out the third series.

Tokaido Road is another that I first bought 12 years ago when I was introduced to L5R and have gone through several copies of as I lend them out to people and then am forced to replace them - usually because they haven't got around to reading it before I get the itch to pick it up once more.

A more recent addition to the list is Electric Church, I don't know whether or not it will last the duration like the others as I've only had it a year or so, but - and I can hear the lynch mob sharpening their pitch forks while I type this - I think I may actually perfer it to Neuromancer.

What about you lot though, what books do you find yourself going back to over and over again.

So, just over a month ago my sister got married. it's taken me this long to post about it because just thinking about the expense of the entire thing threatens my sanity... well perhaps it's just the fact that I've been busy, but it's as good an excuse as anything.

The place itself was amazing, I can completely understand why she fell in love with it when she first saw it.

I thought I'd share some of the photos from it with folks.

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I love this version of the song, definitely one of those very few cases where I prefer the cover to the original version.

So I've been messing around with the RC for Windows 7 at work over the past couple of months, it seems pretty good and so much more stable than Vista ever was.  Resource utilization is much tamer than Vista as well (whoever came up with the Sidebar coding wants shooting).

I'm even contemplating making the move from XP over to it at home, just fired off an order for a 2TB NAS so that I can consolodate all the tat off the PCs and laptops, once that's done I might rebuild one of the laptops first and if all goes well move over the main PC too... probably about time as it's been nearly 18 months since I last rebuilt it and it's starting to get a little clogged up.

Potentially the sad thing though is one of the main reasons I'm thinking about it is because it comes with Chess Titans, it was the only reason I fired Vista Ultimate on a laptop in the first place.